Trying to get time onto our side

No (2012) and Stories We Tell (2013) both play interesting games with time and memory, and use similar means to do so, specifically by employing outdated technology

No, the based-on-fact story of the advertising campaign employed to unseat Pinochet as dictator of Chile in 1988 confused me when I first popped it into the DVD player, because the picture is in the 1:33, Academy ratio, often called "Fool Screen."  I couldn't believe that a distributor of serious foreign film was still issuing full screen additions, and had to check Imdb to confirm that the film was indeed shot in the old television ratio, and for a very specific reason.  No was shot on 3/4" Beta so that its original footage could be seamlessly integrated with historic advertising and news footage.  Some scenes actually show the same real-life figure shot in 2011 side-by-side with 1988 footage running on a nearby monitor.

So No hopes to make the intervening years melt away for the viewer, not by bringing the past up to the present, shining it up and making it contemporary, but sending the present back to a fuzzier, grainier time with bad clothes, bad music and even worse haircuts.  And somehow it works, making the present-day performances and the old videotape blend into one slightly blurry but still quite legible artifact.  Which contains its own irony, in that the whole story is about a manipulation of the truth which was engineered so as to make the truth possible to be spoken aloud.

For somehow, somewhere, someone realized that we are not rational beings.  We do not vote, or purchase things, or live places, or fall in love based on any kind of rational measuring of the risks and rewards, costs and benefits.  We live emotionally, and most especially we vote emotionally.  So the tiny band that wanted to unseat Pinochet, given an absurdly small volume of resources, limited money, personnel and a mere fifteen minutes a night, had to turn the enormous slow-moving ship which is a nation's politics 180 degrees from the direction it was moving.  (Pinochet was seeking a vote of confidence and to give the illusion of fairness the television stations -- all state-controlled of course -- granted fifteen minutes per night for the "Vote Yes" and the "Vote No" contingents.)  The old anti-Pinochet crowd wanted to trot out all the old sufferings and martyrdoms, the torture, the suppression, the shunning by the rest of the world.  But the marketing consultant they bring in (a composite character played by Gael Garcia Bernal) points out that you can't vote against a negative.  There is no such vote.  You have to vote for something.  And Bernal proceeds to market the new Chile like a new soft drink, car, or even charity appeal (one part of the campaign includes a "We Are The World" type anthem, a recording session recreated by the original participants).

To these eyes, we were plunged back into 1988 (especially the corny advertising of the day), the intervening time elided and the filmmakers doing their best to render the film itself transparent so as to let the rather astonishing events show through clear.

Stories We Tell, on the other hand, is reflective to the point of being reflexive, a film about itself, a film seemingly determined to eat its own tail -- or perhaps to be eaten by it.



It's the most familiar old kind of family secret -- I feel as though I've seen two or three films this very year that have turned on this device (although here it is not a device, because it is what really happened in and to this family.)  But the focus is not on the story, but the telling of it, or more precisely, of them, of stories in the plural, which is the whole point.  Everybody has a story, or at least a point of view about the central story and everyone is permitted to chime in, much to the discomfort of some of the participants.

Like the central character of No, Pinochet, the central character of Stories We Tell is dead and cannot speak for herself.  So she must be created out of the collective recollections of her family, friends and extended family and friends, like the elephant described by the blind men, or a whole gang of people describing their own shadows in Plato's cave.  Also like No, the illusion is aided by blending authentic antique Super 8mm footage with newly staged and newly shot Super 8mm with lookalike actors and artificially created settings supplementing the real footage.

However, to be honest, the stories don't really contradict each other, but only inform them.  The only real conflict (this is tricky to do without writing a spoiler) is between Polley and the man who would like to be accepted as part of the family, but is not and cannot be, who asserts that only he knows The Truth, whereas he knows his own truth, which he refuses to share because it will not be accepted as the sole or at least the primary truth.

And finally there is one piece missing.  Polley herself never addresses the ambiguity of her own situation caused by the events she relates in her film.  We see her interacting with her father and with other family members who refuse to be passive participants in the film and can't resist the urge to drag her into the storytelling, whether she wants to be included or not.  And we see her working with her director of photography on the staged sequences, yet never clearly labels or identifies which sequences are real and which are re-created -- in fact she does not even acknowledge the artifice but for editing in these "making of" shots into her film.  Her father points out on camera that she will take all the interviews which in all fairness should run unedited at length and chop them out and put them in counterpoint with each other to create a new narrative, "her" narrative, a constructed thing.

But honestly what is her choice?  To make a film is always to force a liason between reality and artifice and the question is what balance will be struck.  No film will ever live entirely in one camp or another, so why all the embarrassment and reticence about the very medium Polley has chosen to explore these questions?  She needs to take a look at Exit Through The Gift Shop or even Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story to see just how this bargain can be made without equivocation, in fact with the kind of cheeky grin that Stories We Tell could really use.

Perhaps it all comes down to Walton Goggins

Boyd Crowder changes hiI'

I'm not the first person to notice that Walton Goggins is the most palpable link between the most fêted films of the current Oscar season, Lincoln (2012) and Django Unchained.  But maybe Mr. Goggins's progress from unrepentant scoundrel Billy Crash, through the ambiguously wicked Boyd Crowder in Justified through the conflicted Clay Hutchins is itself a microcosm of good and evil in the morally compromised landscape of American history.  (And, incidentally, am I unjustified in suspecting that an actor named Walton Goggins who has a certain unpredictable quality will never play a character named Bob Johnson or Tom Smith?)

As portrayed in Tony Kushner's screenplay, Hutchins is swayed to vote in favor of the 13th Amendment by a promise of employment as a postmaster, given that his re-election prospects were virtually nil.  (A Democrat in post-Civil War Ohio was virtually a non-person.)  There has been a lot of harrumphing written about the horse-trading involved in getting slavery outlawed, as if Doris Goodwin or Tony Kushner had invented corruption in the 19th century, when everyone was obviously more pure and good than they are now.  (Which is why they had slavery and child labor and oppression of women and minorities and no labor or product safety regulation.  'Cause folks used to be good and we didn't need all them pesky laws.)  Much of the pleasure of the film is observing the amount and manner of deals that must be made in order to get mediocre people to do great things, a fact confined neither to history nor to the present moment. It is all very well for great people to lead us, but they are going to have to appeal to the desires of the mediocre.

And Clay Hutchins, at least as portrayed here, is no better than mediocre.  So Mr. Goggins, over the past year of his work, moved from the straightforward sadism (probably rooted in self-hatred) of slavemaster Billy Crash, through the amoral Boyd Crowder, who cares nothing for others, but is uninterested in cruelty for its own sake, to the wavering Clay Hutchins, who is willing to do the right thing if there's something in it for himself as well.  Perhaps this is the most accurate representation of the ways in which a democracy moves toward the moral light, through the historical odyssey of Walton Goggins.

Before I go, a couple of random observations about both theatrical features. 

One of the most admirable aspects of Spielberg's Lincoln is how little it looks like a Spielberg film.  I see him as the master of camera movement and manipulation, and it is amazing how quiet and calm the camera is in Lincoln -- even more than it was in Schindler's List.   Evidently, Spielberg discerned that a text this dense was going to require some stillness so that the audience would absorb the words and not be distracted by shifting images.  It's not static by any means, and the shenanigans of Mr. Bilbo are especially entertaining.  (Despite the uniqueness of that patronimic, I can find no connection between William Bilbo and Theodore Bilbo, the odious white supremacist Senator of the 20th century.)

Does anybody else think this is the darkest Spielberg movie yet?  Not in mood or philosophical outlook, but literally low in footcandles?  Good thing we don't have drive-ins any more.  The film does make it clear what a shabby and ramshackle place the Executive Mansion was and how dark most places were after sunset.  Spielberg has called on cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to be quite a chameleon over the course of their work together, and in this film he impersonates Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness.

And one bit of trivia about Django.  This is a measure of exactly how big a movie geek Quentin Tarantino is.  The lettering of the opening titles, is not just old-timey-Western sort of lettering.  It references a specific period of late 50s-early 60s B Westerns released by Columbia.  The specific shade of red, the splintered-log style letters, all shout "late Randolph Scott (mostly, but not always directed by Budd Boetticher)!"  This is the definition of Too Hip (or Too Lame, depending on how you want to see it) For The Room.  It's mostly of interest because the critics have only referenced spaghetti Westerns, but of course Django is no dish of spaghetti.  For one thing, it's way, way too talky for a non-English-language Western (not to mention that the lips are synchronized with the sound, which is not true in Italian and German Westerns).  And the talk is interesting and tasty and probably dominates the visuals, which is odd for a Western.  Which takes us right back to Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and The Tall T, a Western which, for about two-thirds of its running time takes place in a small circle around a campfire.

So what will it take to get Mr. Tarantino to write for the stage?

Placeholder

There has long been a need for a large-scale Hollywood production to tell the story of the Tuskegee Airmen in battle, completing the story begun in HBO's film.

Red Tails (2012) will have to serve as a placeholder until that film arrives.  It's not bad, and if you're an aerial combat movie fan, I'm sure you'll get your jollies.

Clearly, the script was written for a Stanley Kramer super-earnest aren't-we-good-liberals production of 1956.  Some actual quotes:  "Experience is a cool teacher, gives the exam first and then the lesson."  "We have a right to fight for our country. The same as every other American."

Mind you, somebody got paid to write that.  I checked my watch to make sure it was still 2012.

Did I mention there were snarling blonde Germans with big facial scars?  And Cuba Gooding smokes a big fancy pipe which has the double purpose of reminding you of cliched air force officers in other movies and relieving Mr. Gooding from having to come up with a character.

The worst thing about the CGI, especially in a movie produced by George Lucas, is that it does not adhere to the George Lucas rule of technology props -- they must not look like you took this stuff straight out of the box.  Remember how beat-up the Milennium Falcom was?  Made it more believable didn't it?  The planes in Red Tails look like they were made by Aurora, not Boeing.

Bryan Cranston is showing up in movies lately like that jerk who got himself in the picture for every club in the school yearbook.  Note to producers -- Cranston is good, but there are a couple of other good actors in the movie business.

John Wayne would be disturbed by the predictability and cliche of this movie.  Buy the Blu-Ray pack, take out the History Channel documentary Double Victory and throw the rest away.

Kicking history when it's down

It is difficult, observing the rules I have set for this blog (and which I often traduce), to limit myself to observations regarding Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) and not to make judgments or to make silly jokes with the title, which, in my opinion, is just ASKING for it.

Everybody has to stop taking for granted how great Spielberg is with kids.  From the evidence of this movie, it's not easy, and this is from Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliott.  It's not just that the child character is irritating as conceived by the writer, he's irritating in practice.  No wonder his mother lets him roam around the city without supervision.  Anything to get him out of the house.

Second, making Max von Sydow a mute character just means you're too lazy to come up with a reason why this man has a funny accent.  Von Sydow has a beautiful and expressive voice.  There are a million better non-verbal actors than he.  I guess everyone was just thrilled with the novelty of von Sydow not speaking in English or in Swedish, and thought they were some jam-dandy acting.  He's not bad, but as a student of silent film, I've seen a lot better.

Third, dressing up an empty shaggy dog story with a great national tragedy does not give it significance -- it reduces its significance.  Having the boy's father die in the Twin Towers adds utterly nothing to the story; the only thing that matters is that he is dead.  The oblique visual suggestion that he died plummeting from the building just adds a forsting of grotesquerie onto a big Bad Taste Cake.

I recognize that this is a very weak blog entry, but I literally had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen and resisting the desire to look away and do something else.  A movie that is almost successful, though not quite, can sharpen one's powers of observation.  Something this wide of the mark seems to dull the senses.  Sorry.

Steven Spielberg, film historian

Echoing "Night of the Hunter"?

Written reactions to Steven Spielberg's film version of War Horse (2011) is virtually a litmus test of each writer's film history knowledge.  Youngsters who think Titanic is a classic old-timey movie dismiss the film as sentimental slop, riddled with cliche and overstatement.  A few recognized some quotes from Gone With The Wind, usually misattributing the palette and compositions of the film to Victor Fleming, the named director.  But Fleming essentially directed the actors.  The look of the film was designed from top to bottom by William Cameron Menzies with the collaboration of cinematographers Ernst Haller and Fleming's favorite, Lee Garmes.  These would be the source of the oversaturated colors behind near-silhouetted figures as in, for instance the final shot of War Horse.

But Gone With The Wind is just the beginning.  War Horse draws from the work of David Lean (who Spielberg evoked brilliantly in Empire of the Sun) but also other epic filmmakers of the 1950s George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann.  But it also goes straight back to Lewis Milestone (specifically All Quiet On The Western Front), and silent filmmakers F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage and especially King Vidor, director of The Big Parade and The Crowd as well as the 1956 War and Peace.  Spielberg does not do DVD commentaries (a sensible position), but I would love a commentary by really knowledgeable film scholar who could annotate the sources, whether overt or sub rosa.

Which is not to say that the film is pasted together from film references like a Brian DePalma movie.  Spielberg has thoroughly absorbed this vocabulary, like an author deliberately writing in an archaic style.  With all the fuss about last year's The Artist, I would love to see Spielberg make a substantially silent film--I think he is the director most qualified in the world to express himself in that challenging and classical form.  The exquisite no-man's-land sequence, designed by Rick Carter, would not be out of place in an epic of the mid-1920s, and the dialogue (with a German fluent in English) might have played even better on title cards than being heard.

Which is not to say that Mr. Spielberg doesn't know how to use a soundtrack.  For one thing, John Williams has written his best score in many years, although, he, like Spielberg, is creating in a borrowed idiom.  In this case it is the work of early 20th century British composers such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Bax, Walton, Britten and Grainger.  Again, there is no actual plagiarism, but the full immersion in a particular language.

Non-musical sound plays a part in one of the three-shots in this film that I would nominate for all-time greats in film history.  That is the moment when two young German deserters have been discovered and are being shot on the spot at late dusk or early evening.  The camera suddenly jumps from the base of the windmill in which the boys have been ensconced to high in the air, just the other side of the windmill's sails.  The boys are lined up with their backs to us.  The officer calls "Fire" and at that very instant a windmill sail obscures our view.  We hear the gunshot and the sail has passed revealing the bodies strewn on the ground.

Earlier in the movie there is a shot that would have made Eisenstein weep in recognition of a brother filmmaker.  The British are making an insane, under-manned, under-weaponed charge on a German encampment.  (The sequence begins with a brilliant shot of the officers mounting amid tall grass that obscures  the horses.)  At first, the Brits seem to be triumphant until they reach the end of the open field and the edge of the adjacent wood.  There the Germans have hidden their automatic guns, with which they proceed to demolish the British cavalry.  But we never see the falls.  We see the moment of recognition on the cavalry officers' faces that they have made a devastating miscalculation.  Then we see riderless horses leaping over and past the German guns.  Back to the mounted charge.  Back to the empty horses.  The audience puts those two shots together with that beautiful mathematics of film editing:  (Shot of mounted officers charging PLUS shot of riderless horses leaping past machine guns EQUALS officers falling dead from their horses.)

My next is a throwaway, but it simply demonstrates that Spielberg breathes the syntax of film.  It is an establishing shot of a person entering the stable in which the title character, Joey has been hidden.  We see the person first as a large, dark, convex reflection.  Then we realize it is a reflection in Joey's eye.  It is not only an inventive way to open a sequence, but it reminds us that the film is really about Joey and that we are always viewing the world through Joey's eyes.  All of this work, I have to presume, is executed with the superb collaboration of Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's cinematographer since Schindler's List.

We knew that Spielberg is great with young actors and he has done his usual sterling work with Jeremy Irvine as Joey's faithful friend Albert and most especially with Celine Buckman as Emilie, the beautiful and tragic young protector of Joey.  But one must add to this the evocative "acting" of the horses playing Joey and Topthorn.  Be it the work of handlers and experts, Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn have put the shots together so as to simulate acting that is more convincing than many a so-called human actor.

The climactic reunion between Albert and Joey is most frequently acted as ridiculous, sentimental, implausible.  Again, this demonstrates an ignorance of this classical mode of storytelling.  It is not meant to be journalism, nor is it meant to be startling or surprising.  The mechanics of the scene were carefully put in place in the first act (my wife and I remarked to each other that the particular device would doubtless return in Act III).  The genre is closer to fable or legend than to film realism.  That is not an accident -- it is a choice.

Not only is War Horse one of the best World War I films I have ever seen, making it clear what a price nearly every person in Europe paid for that bit of insanity: I would list it as one of Spielberg's five best films, with Empire of the Sun, Jaws, Munich and Duel.  Yes, it's a perverse list, but hey, this is my blog.  Make your own list on your own blog.

A star is found

David Carr tells his colleagues What Is

Page One: Inside The New York Times (2011) is either metafilm if you are a philosopher or Pirandellian if you favor theatrical analogy.  The title promises a PBS-style process piece about how a newspaper is turned out.  But the film is about a newspaper reporting its own death and (it hopes) resurrection.

We get a little process -- a couple of Page One meetings, what All The President's Men called budget meetings -- but the bulk of the film focuses on the Media News department reporting on the dissolution of print media both at the hands of digital media, which certainly destroyed the classified advertising business which was the economic basis of all local newspapers, as wellas by the blindness, greed, fear and incompetence of the managers of traditional media.  It is notable that the Times, after a decade of mistakes and attempted cover-ups now so courageously charts the course of the cancer that may just kill it.

So far, we have a good episode of Frontline.  But what happens in Page One is what often separates theatrical documentaries from television nonfiction, the arrival of a star performer.  In this case, it's David Carr, a too-good to be true beat reporter who literally keeps his head down, yet plows ahead toward the facts driving his stories and devlin-take-the-hindmost.  It helps that Carr has his own dramatic biography, touching the absolute bottom of addiction and desperation and coming out the other end, the most conventional and humble of suburban single dads.  He is a compelling character, with a raspy voice doubtless damaged by living on the street and/or cocaine addiction, an odd compulsive forward tilt of the head and a Columbo-like disingenuous manner of interrogating his targets, like a cat carelessly toying with a mouse, delaying the moment of the kill.

Clearly Carr has no animus toward the malefactors of the media, but he has no hesitation in calling out greed and stupidity, and backing up his claims with names, dates and numbers.  It's a wonder that he isn't now being fictionalized into a character for a new USA Network series (maybe he is). 

There are a lot of other good, well-meaning folk, Carr's bosses, whose names can be found in other discussions of this film, but to me, Carr's unintentional wresting of the spotlight from the historical trends and concepts with which the filmmakers undoubtedly embarked proves one essential truth of film narrative -- character beats ideas every day of the week.

House of Wax





DiCaprio & Hammer with slabs of veal glued to their faces.

  
There is one moment in which Leonard DiCaprio is completely convincing as the titular character in J. Edgar (2011).  It comes toward the end when a stricken Clyde Tolson discovers Hoover stretched out on the floor, white, tubby and lifeless.  I've seen some dead bodies in my time, and in my opinion, Leonardo completely nailed it.

I'm not sure why anyone is still producing these movies from the Madame Tussaud school of filmmaking.  We no longer believe their mythmaking--books of popular biography provide more and better information for those who are interested in historical characters.  For the general public, one needs to cook up a new angle, a fresh scandal or a new interpretation.  My Week With Marilyn tells an untold story, gives us a new window into Marilyn (and into Sir Larry as well) which, together with Michelle Williams' performance, justifies yet another Monroe go-round.

There is nothing remarkable or new in J Edgar, and that includes DiCaprio's predictable performance.  Hampered by the worst make-up since Billy Crystal in Mister Saturday Night, DiCaprio demonstrates no deep understanding about how older people move and think.  He still looks like a boy, albeit a puffy boy, wearing grown-up clothes and acting "old" like the other kids in the school play do, but without having actually done the hard work of thinking through how the moving parts of the body age.  It is utterly mysterious to me how DiCaprio became a Master Actor, playing leads for Scorsese, including the even more inapt Howard Hughes.  Kevin Spacey is a master actor.  William H Macy, Gary Oldman, Ryan Gosling, Stanley Tucci, Paul Giamatti (who would have been a great Hoover if he'd had a good script) are Master Actors.  They make startling choices.  They have supple, expressive voices and eyes.  DiCaprio is well-intentioned, but never surprising, never fresh and rarely authentic.

But even if he were good, he would still be in stuck in a film that no one had taken the trouble to decide what it was about.  It spends most of its time rehearsing the well-known public outlines of Hoover's life, the Palmer Raids, the gangster era, the Lindbergh baby, the Commie hunts, the conflict with the Kennedys.  This is bad TV movie stuff (and executed in exactly that fashion) and utterly unnecessary.  The interesting, juicy stuff between Hoover and alleged lover Clyde Tolson is based virtually entirely on speculation.  Mixing this together indiscriminately with documented fact renders the entire film unreliable and therefore unengaging.  Better to have fabricated everything and focused solely on Hoover's domestic arrangements, with perhaps a nod to the hypocrisy of his public crusades, than to have jumbled docudrama and "drama" drama.  Nonetheless, the question of Hoover's possible homosexuality is neither settled nor explored, so why bring it up at all?  Where a film like Secret Honor is willing to make up the entire inner monologue of Richard Nixon's tortured soul; likewise Oliver Stone's films, especially Nixon and W dare to invent their psychodrama, much as Shakespeare would project his own dramatic ideas onto the House of Lancaster, whether or not those ideas fit the facts.  J Edgar is afraid to veer from the public record, and is stuck with a central character who is too repressed and tight-lipped to enlighten us, or, more sadly, himself.


Meryl Streep attempts to let her dental appliance do the acting.

 
The larger point is that you can't tell a story unless you've decided on a story to tell, which is also the problem with The Iron Lady (2011).  At least it has a bit of a performance, although it is not clear what it is that Meryl Streep is supposed to be doing when she is not doddering around as the dementia-ridden remnant of the feared Margaret Thatcher.  Much of the obligatory "rise to power" sequence is handled by another actress, as we are not expected to accept Meryl Streep as a young woman in her 20s anymore.  So Streep only handles a portion of the flashbacks, but as in J Edgar, it's hard to see what they're getting at.  Thatcher's only motivation to enter public service seems to be to emulate her adored father, small businessman and chamber-of-commerce leader.  Thatcher brings a nearly fully-formed political philosophy to bear, but we never see whwere it came from, how it started or how it evolved.

Art Tatum is my favorite jazz musician.  He might be my favorite musician period.  No one will ever make a story of his life.  At least I hope they don't.  Because Art Tatum arrived as an artist complete and completely sui generis.  His influences are minimal and generic, and the people he influenced few (because few have the technical skill).  His style shifted slightly with the advent of bebop -- he added some extended chords to his toolbox, but there is no mistaking Tatum for anyone else, from his first recording in 1932 or so and his last in 1956.  Great art.  Great, great art, but no story.

The worst thing about spending a lot of time with a person experiencing advanced stages of dementia is that it is very repetitive.  I doff my hat to writer Abi Morgan's fidelity to this painful subject, but major points off for sheer boredom.  If there was anything to say about the dementia, if it was related to Thatcher's career, if there was some metaphoric connection, perhaps maintaining a Conservative outlook requires a bit of amnesia, I don't know, something.  But let's face it, dementia happens to lots and lots of people and there is not anything dramatic about it.  If Michael Phelps gets arthritis, you've got a story.  If Truman Capote, who loved nothing better than to loll on a sofa, gets it -- not much story.  So Streep does her best bent old lady wobble, but so what?  (The Academy Award given to Streep should have gone to the costume designer, the wigmaker and whoever swiped those front teeth from the corpse of Alistair Sim.)  Did somebody think that famous people don't experience the ordinary infirmities of old age?

And why, for heaven's sake, is so much running time given to it?  Were we supposed to have trouble figuring out that husband Dennis isn't really there, it's just in her mind?  (Jim Broadbent was clearly hired in order to repeat what he won an Oscar for in Iris.)  Got that in the first speech, thank you, we saw The Sixth Sense.  So if there is no twist to come, why does that go on and on.  And if she's senile, how can she be accurately remembering her entire political career?  Wouldn't she remember it wrong?  Wouldn't Michael Foot be wearing a chicken suit and Parliament turning into a disco?  As in J Edgar, why the dry factoid rehearsal of her life story without any comment or perspective?

I mean really, why?  I hope nobody expected to get rich on these films.  They're sure not going to get any drama or insight.

Just Cause or "jus' cuz"

2010 saw two new entries in what I might call the "pre-gunpowder conflict" genre. Centurion (2010) is one of those all-CGI-all-the-time epics that allows one to gouge and maim characters with mad abandon and without angering the actors' unions. The real problem is that if you like this sort of thing, you can get it right in the comfort of your own home torture chamber and abbatoir, courtesy of the Spartacus series on Starz (also on DVD and Netflix streaming).

But aside from its lack of uniqueness (coupled with lack of originality or quality performance, either in technical or non-technical categories), the truly fatal aspect of Centurion is that it tries to make Roman centurions into heroes.

William Goldman says nobody knows anything and there may not be any rules in art, but still I say: UNWANTED INVADERS ARE NEVER THE HEROES. Not even if all their friends are killed, not even if they're helpless and unarmed and turned into quarry for an implacable killing machine, who is part of the native troops. Natives = good; invaders = bad. Maybe this wasn't true back in the 1930s and 1940s when we thought the British Empire was cool, but those days are long gone. I don't care if the invaders are played by the offspring of George Clooney and Brad Pitt -- Invaders Are Bad. So when the Picts pronounce a death sentence on the Romans, we don't say, "Oh goodness, how will those poor Romans get out of there?" We say, "Good, die you miserable arrogant Romans." And don't forget, Romans were played by snooty English actors all through the 50s and 60s while Americans played the denizens of Palestine or whatever the local area was, so we were conditioned -- Romans are cruel, greedy and jerks. And when they're invading -- Hey, remember when the British tried to invade in 1775-6? Remember how much we liked that? And nowadays Brits don't even like Brits.

Centurion was doomed before the first camera turned. A terrible idea terribly executed.

Robin Hood (2010) was dead on arrival, but for slightly different reasons. It's not a bad movie, but it's Not A Robin Hood Movie. What's a Robin Hood movie? Oh, you know -- trickery, derring-do, thumbing the nose and cocking a snoot at entrenched power. Robin Hood is the proto-American Tax Rebel. He is clever, he is crafty. He tricks the Sheriff and his foolish henchmen, woos the Maid Marian, uses disguises, subterfuges and generally outwits power. What's more, he uses what he gets to help people who really need it -- honest, hard-working folk who have been sucked dry by the powers that be and need a little leg-up to keep their heads above water. What red-blooded Murkin doesn't love that story? I think this is an area where most of us can agree -- the guy who Sticks It To The Man and Does Justice is Awesome.

But somebody let a bunch of Brits and Ozzies make a Robin Hood movie and They Don't Get It. This is particularly appalling in the case of the Ozzie in Question, as he is Mr. Rebel, the Gladiator Who Will Not Take Crap From Anybody, Russell Crowe. I assume he did this picture because he owed somebody money. Maybe it was a tax problem. (That would be appropriate. But NOT ironic, OK?)

Because 3/4s of this movie is an attempt at an origin story, and an establishment-oriented one at that. First, our hero is an archer for the king, then things go wrong, he assumes the identity of some nobleman, pretends to be married to Cate Blanchett and all the time everyone is running around with big crossbows and swords and maces and nobody is hiding in a tree, ambushing a nobleman, pulling off some big switcheroo. It's all big battle scenes and something about some traitor who's working for France, so the big climactic battle is all about defending England against France, and like I say, where are the people rebelling against the nobility? That's Robin Hood!

Look, you make all the medieval strategy and battle movies you want, but DON'T CALL THEM "ROBIN HOOD." Honestly, I find it impossible to critique this movie -- it's the usual Ridley Scott, the CGI has gotten a lot better since Gladiator and if you like movies where guys wear armor, have greasy beards and say "Aye" a lot, this is the picture for you.

But me, I'm sticking with Douglas Fairbanks and Erroll Flynn. Heck, they know how to have fun, which Russell Crowe NEVER does.

Persistence of vision (and families)

For regular filmgoers, award season is like the best film festival in the world. This time of year it's possible to move from one excellent film to another over the course of a week or so, and yet I suspect you will not read another piece this month that compares The King's Speech (2010) with The Fighter (2010).

The superficial resemblances are easy - both are Little Movies That Could, extremely low-budget projects that attracted top-level talent due to the excellence of their respective scripts and the dedication and integrity of the producers. Both are based on actual events. Both deal with overcoming of physical challenges - stammering and getting beaten in the hand, respectively. Both confront problems with communication - in one case literal, and the other interfamilial communication breaking down.

But at a deeper level, both are films about overcoming the limited expectations and horizons that families can place upon an individual, especially the second son. Bertie was never expected to be king, and was specifically trained for the task, though it turns out his sense of duty and honor -- the most important attributes of a modern constitutional monarch, were more developed that his older brother David's. And Dickie Eklund was supposed to be the Pride of Lowell, not his younger half-brother Mickey Ward. Both succeed through hard work and persistence that their seniors are incapable of.

Not all second sons are literally second. Although chronologically younger, Jeb Bush was spiritually the first son of his family, the promising one, marked for success; George was the disappointment, the screw-up, the one for whom the bar was lowered. The second President Bush's story was about overcoming those family expectations, which may be one reason he is such a sympathetic person for so many Americans. Clearly, it's a story with a lot of power, as the reception for each of these films demonstrates admirably.

Both films are also about teachers who break through with their students not just by dint of skill and tenacity, but through transformative love. Many times -- too many times -- it is a teacher rather than a parent who can see through the shell a child builds around himself to see the real person inside and the real potential locked in that shell. There is no great teaching without love, and that may be the greatest lesson we take from these films.

A couple of specific observations about each. Much has been made of the fact that at one time the screenplay of The King's Speech took the form of a play. It is not clear how serious the writer was about having the story produced in that form (there was one public reading), but the real aim seems to have been to focus the storytelling on the two principal characters and the confined setting in which much of Bertie's transformation takes place. Conventional thinking suggests that this is uncinematic storytelling -- two people locked in a room. Hitchcock of all people proved that a limited group of people in a confined setting is exactly the sort of pressure cooker situation that makes for great film. He boasted to Truffaut that he could make a film in a phone booth (which, I suspect the reason the film Phone Booth was written and produced, despite its then-anachronistic situation -- just to answer Hitchcock's dare).

But in order to pull this off, director Tom Hooper takes a page from Sidney Lumet's book (specifically with regard to Twelve Angry Men) and rarely uses the same set-up or the same lens in any two scenes set in Logue's office. In addition, Eve Stewart and Netty Chapman have made the space, supposedly barren and dilapidated, fascinating and complex to look at, especially the wall which displays multiple layers of paint and wallpaper, with the result being a rich mosaic that one might pay a lot of money to have created from scratch. Hooper uses a variety of short lenses to emphasize the confinement and the strange distortions of life in the royal bubble, most obviously in a scene in which Logue first encounters members of the court and we see them loom in a bulging way reminiscent of a FedEx commercial of the 1980s. Conversely, as Bertie and Lionel stroll through the fog into what will become a rift between them, the lens is very long, minimizing the distance between the royal and the commoner who follows a step or two behind him.

I was not surprised by the humor and wit of the film, nor the skill of Firth, Rush and Bonham-Carter. What was utterly surprising was the intensity of emotion I felt during those coaching scenes. At the risk of cliche, I felt myself present in the room, and I ached for Bertie to succeed and to triumph. I will be interested to see the film again to see how that effect was achieved for me, whether it be the agonizing set-up in the first scene, the callousness of Bertie's father and brother, the generous love of Bertie's wife or the rooting interest developed for Logue -- or, most likely, the confluence of those forces. This is not to slight the great presence of charisma of Colin Firth, who we treat as one of those good Reliable English Actors, but is in fact a movie star of the order of Peter O'Toole or Richard Burton, without the alcohol, wives and bad taste. Which is not to say he's not sexy -- he's my wife's favorite, and given that she's married to me, the sexiness bar standard is very high. (Kidding, folks.)

The Fighter makes a fascinating contrast technically for all its narrative and spiritual common ground. Where The King's Speech looks and feels carefully designed, its camera moves smooth and graceful as its production design, The Fighter seems to have been caught on the fly just as the HBO documentary about Dickie's crack addiction which dominates the first third of the film has been. (I thought at first that the documentary frame was going to be a guiding narrative device for the entire film, but it is dropped before it wears out its usefulness.) This is clearly a choice, as director David O. Russell's films (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster) have previously favored more deliberately created imagery.

There is a critical pitfall in such filmmaking, as it invites the viewer to devalue the acting, as it seems to have been part of the reality being captured by the camera. So it was heartening to see Christian Bale and especially Melissa Leo recognized for their work in the form of nominations and awards. Bale's work is the kind of total transformation we expect of his kind of master character actor, to the point that it is hard to remember what his "real" persona is like. But Melissa Leo rose to prominence in roles that were extravagantly deglamorized, most notably her hard-bitten veteran detective on Homicide. Her Alice wishes to be glamorous, to be put together, almost as if to spread a patina over a seamy existence and an exploitative relationship with her own, beloved son. Hopefully this will open new doors for an underrated artist.

Finally, The Fighter constitutes a new entry in the small, but growing sub-genre of films based in Eastern Massachusetts. Many of these are associated with Matt Damon or the Affleck brothers, but this one is not (although Matt Damon was once pencilled in for the Bale role). Two of them, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone are based on the work of the superb novelist Dennis Lehane. It might make sense to examine these films as a coherent sub-genre about a corner of America from which the parade has gone by, perhaps forever, leaving broken dreams and despair, from which the occasional triumph, as in The Fighter, gleams all the brighter.

Sins of the fathers

Watching The White Ribbon (2009) feels like taking a bath in disinfectant. You are better off when you're finished, but it's pretty tough while you're going through it. The pleasures of the film are more ascetic than aesthetic.

One cannot deny the purely cinematic artistry of a film like this. Whereas I found his previous film, Cache a confused jumble of jabber about a number of conflicting ideas, The White Ribbon is purely visual, clear, specific and precise. It speaks through simple objects: a pen, a dead bird, a burning barn, mangled cabbages, and the white ribbons of the title. In the pre-Christian world, white ribbons offered protection from evil and harm; here, a father ties the white ribbon on his children to protect them from being harmed by the evil in their own minds.

The viewer most wonder if the use of black and white is a reflection of the community's Manichean view of the world, or of fallible memory, for the narrator confesses at the opening of the film: “I don’t know if the story I’m about to tell is entirely true.” (This has the added advantage of excusing Haneke if his interpretation of the German character is incorrect -- it's just that the schoolmaster remembered it that way. )

Moreover, black and white makes it easier to conceal the tripwire that brings down horse and man in the first sequence and starts the cascade of horrors visited on this village. The source of that evil remains as invisible as the tripwire itself, even though it is out in the open and plain to
see, if one has the will to do so.

Most of the discussion of this film has been about morality, sociology, psychology or history. This is merely a film blog, so let me reserve my opinion along these lines. What is striking about this film is that it is possible to make a good film without a scrap of beauty. There is no music but for some diagetic dance music at a harvest festival. There is not one blue sky, not one lovely tree, not a human face depicted with tenderness. All is cruel and cold and terrible. The implication is that cruelty like this is passed on unless one makes a conscious effort to break the chain. And the film simulates the cruelty by communicating the chill.

In an analogous fashion, the documentary Tell Them Who You Are (2005) gets invited into our cinematic parlor by purporting to be a portrait of cinematographer, documentarian and sometime director Haskell Wexler (photographer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In The Heat of the Night, American Graffiti and director of Medium Cool). But it quickly develops into a portrait of an overbearing, unfaithful, jealous and sometimes controlling father who, over the course of the film, learns to accept his son as an independent and worthy artist of his own.

On the way, the younger Wexler gets advice from a surrogate father, Conrad Hall, Paul Newman, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda (who both had toxic fathers) and Michael Douglas, who must have fought similar battles for artistic and personal identity with his father, Kirk Douglas. The challenge is to stop the cycle of attempting to control that which will follow us, always a feckless task.

If you come to Tell Them Who You Are merely as a film buff, you will be disappointed. The clips are few and limited, and the only good "making of" stories are about the films Wexler was fired from, usually for trying to control the direction (most notably One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest). That need for control, for recognition, for acknowledgment seems to make so many men into Willie Lomans who push their children away the harder they try and pull them in. (The answer to the film's title is: You are my son. The implication is: ...and nothing else.)

Tellingly, although father is famous as a shooter and father and son are both seen handling cameras throughout the film, it has to be acknowledged that Mark Wexler's triumph in Tell Them Who You Are is as a cutter. The cinematography is unremarkable -- why would it be in a videotape documentary, the writing and direction nonexistent. (A good deal of footage is taken up with Wexler pere attempting to tell fils how to stage a scene.) A documentary is directed in the cutting room, and Mark Wexler's success is testified to by his father's tears at seeing the finished product.

I'm not saying you'll be in tears, although if you have a judgmental parent you have struggled to get out from under, you might be. The White Ribbon shows how this parental poison may be left to fester and infect another generation; Tell Them Who You Are demonstrates how it may be purged.

More pie, Mr. Keaton?

Hollywood Cavalcade (1939) starts out so well-intentioned, it is easy to forgive a lot of its conflations, misstatements and mythologizing. You gotta like a film that doesn't just concoct a story about the invention of throwing pies in slapstick comedies, but actually delves into the question as to what are the best types of pies to throw.

1939 marks the beginning of self-consciousness for Hollywood. The talkies had been in place for 10 or 11 years and it was becoming apparent that the pioneers of the first decades of film were at or near retirement age, and that it was time to memorialize film history. Hollywood, like John Ford, has always believed "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So a story was concocted for Don Ameche to play a pioneering filmmaker who begins as Mack Sennett and transmogrifies Cecil B. DeMille, two figures who, together embrace much of American silent film history. (Alice Faye is the heroine, but given that they took away her one and only song for the movie, she hardly makes a mark in the film, except as a darn good sport with all those pies and all that mud.)

It is of course, marvelous, for a slapstick buff to see not only Buster (still relatively young and fit) but Chester Conklin, Hank Mann, Snub Pollard and Ben Turpin in Glorious Technicolor. For that one is willing to accept some gross, but probably not important, inaccuracies. It bunches all of these fellows (including) Buster into a proto-Keystone Kops group. (Few of them were in the Kops, and Buster never worked for Sennett and never threw pies at all in his movies.) Buster does re-create the motorcycle stunt from Sherlock, Jr. with the very game Alice Faye. There's even a brief doff of the hat to Fatty Arbuckle, as a rotund actor is seen from behind walking through the lot and is greeted by a stagehand, "Hi, Roscoe."

Later, the Don Ameche character starts to get into biblical epics and the romantic complications with Alice Faye take center stage, and those have the same effect on me now as they did when I was 10 or 11--get rid of the mushy stuff and back to the slapstick!

Oddly, though few of the "facts" about film history in this film are correct, the spirit is right, not to mention, recreation of silent film stages and production procedures. Unfortunately, some of the clips were used over the years as authentic examples of silent film, but Hollywood Cavalcade can't be blamed for that. The participation of so many who were there makes it a valuable historic resource for the look and feel the silent era. The Buster Keaton Story, produced 19 years later, should only have had that level of authenticity.

There's nothing wrong with film that couldn't be cured with more Buster Keaton. (Wouldn't you love to see Buster's version of Inception?)

Living history

To take off my dispassionate-film-blogger hat and put on my educator hat, Wild Boys of the Road (1933) should be required viewing in every high school class studying the Great Depression in America.

First of all, it was recording the events as they unfolded, without any knowledge of the outcome or assurance that everything would turn out all right. (I also marvel at WWII-era films that way--what faith we had as a people!) Second, it reflects, very powerfully and plausibly, exactly the effect this depression had on young people exactly the age of our high school students today. In other words--if you want students to sense exactly how it would feel for them to have lived through the Great Depression as people their own age--Wild Boys of the Road spells it out.

It is obviously a deeply felt film by director William Wellman, employing speed, trials and tribulations, rain, deep bonding and loyalty among young men--and in this case, one young woman is added to "the club." But it is rendered with a focus and an intensity that shows Wellman gathering his powers.

As with its predecessor, Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys begins by showing the fall from the middle class. These are not the undeserving poor--these are the children of workers and middle managers whom the System has failed. At first, it seems as though the downturn is something that families can weather with a little belt-tightening and a healthy dose of patience. But it becomes apparent that there are no jobs and that none are coming. Our hero, played by Frankie Darro like a small dark Cagney, sells off his beloved jalopy, symbol of carefree times--teenage freedom and emerging sexuality. It becomes evident that sacrifice will not be enough and the boys forge a plan to leave home and go on the bum to relieve their families of the burden of supporting them. So strong is the middle class ethos of optimism, that Darro's parting note to his parents is based on a blatant lie about work waiting for him out of town, a lie his parents are happy to accept for their own peace of mind.

There follows a section with little sugar coating. They ride in empty box cars, receiving regular beatings from railroad thugs. They meet a girl dressed as a boy, and although it is not stated as such, it is presumably her defense against rape. This is brought home by the rape of another girl by that all-purpose movie thug, Ward Bond, who perishes at the hands of an angry mob of kids seeking revenge. It feels so refreshing to reach back to before the decades of antiseptic lies about the world as found in films in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Something about that crisis in the early 30s gave them courage to speak--and to hear--the ugly truth about what was going on. There is feeling, yes, even sentiment, but not forced or falsified, shoehorned to make some kind of point or moral lesson.

The most famous moment in the film is that of the boy who, lacking the strength to pull his body out of harm's way, loses his foot under an oncoming train. It's still shocking, and technically impeccable-the effect work is seamless. But the strength of the sequence comes later, when the kids have browbeaten a local doctor into caring for the boy. An amputation takes place in the train yard, almost a precursor of the similar sequence in Gone With The Wind. But what makes Wild Boy's amputation sequence powerful is how Frankie Darro stays with his friend, comforting him, bucking him up, lying to him a little bit, completely giving himself to this other person for their sake. At that moment, you know it is that feeling of belonging to each other and mutual sacrifice that will ensure the nation's survival.

Wellman wanted a completely pessimistic ending, which the studio rejected. And this time, I believe the studio was right. First of all, it would be too much to endure 75 minutes of misery and end with an outlook of more misery. Second, it is truthful and natural that the good things in our lives are generally not delivered by systems and institutions, but by individuals stepping out of their predetermined roles, perhaps even bucking the system and giving others a chance, as the kindly FDR-like judge does at the end of this film. Moreover, it's been established that these children, damaged as they are, have the spirit and will to survive and thrive--and, as we now know with hindsight, defeat mankind's most dangerous enemies in the second World War. What a crucible those children passed through.

And Wild Boys has its own movie-movie satisfactions--the snatching of a cake as the boys run from the police, Frankie Darro's neat leap into a handy ashcan, disappearing completely. And most satisfying is the final film appearance of former chorus girl Dorothy Coonan. She had already retired from the screen when she married director William Wellman. But Wellman pressured into acting one more time, convincingly playing a tough and resourceful teenage girl, though she was already 30. Best of all, she cadges spare change on the street by dancing to the song "42nd Street" and performing exactly the same tap dance steps she performed in that film only a few months before. Put the sequences side by side--you'll see she remembered the routine step for step. Though unintended, that correspondence between films creates an irony that virtually encapsulates the Great Depression in itself. "Good times and bum times, I've seen them all and, my dear, I'm still here..."

Journalism vs. Narrative

Heroes for Sale (1933) is more important to American history today than to cinema history. It began filming just before FDR's inauguration and concluded at the end of the first month. It is packed with ideas and controversies of the day, including morphine addiction, class, automation, capital vs. labor, communism and the Bonus Army, in the ripped-from-the-headlines mode of Warner Bros under production chief Darryl Zanuck.

The hero, played by D.W. Griffith repertory company member Richard Barthelmess, in one of his few successful performances in a leading role in a talking picture. As is often surprising for silent film stars, his manner and style are a bit stagy, but his sincerity wins over anything. Still, one has to accept a father who abandons his adopted son in order to tramp around the country being a fugitive/philanthropist. Makes sense from the studio that brought you the harrowing I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang.

Makes sense for a script co-written by sometime con man, journalist and adventure Wilson Mizner. Direction is by William Wellman, so you can count on speed--so much speed that a lot of story tropes are dropped before they're done in order to pick up a new thread--rain, and male camaraderie. The hero and the man who wronged him meet in a muddy shelter under a bridge (which resembles a foxhole), and acknowledge that, as former comrades-in-arms, they must reconcile, even though it does them no good, since the sheriff is ready to run them out of town anyway.

As for the Communist who turns into an oppressive exploiter--is that a comment about Communists, about capitalism, or is he just a convenient story catalyst?